Installing WordPress Locally under Windows XP

Installing WordPress Locally Under Windows XPIn the past few weeks, I’ve tested a few blogging platforms for the upcoming launch of Geeksaresexy.net, and right now, I hesitate between 2 alternatives: WordPress and Textpattern. I’ll be fooling around with both in coming weeks to familiarize myself with them. I have now been running WordPress for a week or so, and I must say that I am quite impressed by its ease of installation. Running a local version of your blog is very useful because it lets you fool around with themes and plugins to your heart’s desire without having to risk breaking your live blog.Here’s a little guide that will help you install and run WordPress locally on your XP box in less then 10 minutes:1- Get XAMPP lite for Windows. Choose the exe version, and install it at the root of your C drive.2- Browse to C:xampplite and double click setup_xampp.bat3- Once that is done, double click xampp-control.exe and start the Apache and Mysql services.4- Open your browser and go to this address: http://localhost/. From the menu on the left column, choose your preferred language.5- Now that the interface displays a language that you can understand, click on phpMyAdmin (on the left column once again)6- Enter “wordpress” (without quotes) in the “Create New Database” Field, and select utf8_unicode_ci in the drop down box in the next field (as shown in the picture below). Click on Create. The Xampp setup is now complete.7- Download WordPress and unzip it under c:xampplitehtdocs.8- You should now have a wordpress folder under c:xampplitehtdocs. Browse to the folder, and you will see a file named wp-config-sample.php. Open it in your favourite text editor and replace the default values by the ones you see under this paragraph. Save the file as wp-config.php (under the same folder).// ** MySQL settings ** //define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’); // The name of the databasedefine(‘DB_USER’, ‘root’); // Your MySQL usernamedefine(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ”); // …and password (needs to be empty, just for local install)define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value9- Open your browser and navigate to http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php , follow the instructions, and voila, you are done.That was easy wasn’t it?source: